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Bay Area Intifada: Identity Politics with a Capital ‘I’

It’s four in the morning, and we are sitting on my rooftop in Istanbul with Jabar, overlooking the Golden Horn. The conversation is racing at a mile a minute, from Taksim Square to Tahrir Square, to Jerusalem, Cape Town and finally, Oakland, California. We talk about the good friends we had, and good friends we lost along the way. Those with whom we shared the same opinions and barricades are recalled in kinship terms.

There are plenty of things to compare, too.

Jabar tells me how white anarchists who recently settled in Oakland feel intimidated by the exuberance of the local people of colour in their “safe spaces”.

I tell him how middle class Turkish professionals who were teaching yoga at Gezi park in the summer of 2013 got all the credit for the protests, while it was in fact Kurdish militants who were manning barricades day and night to make the occupation possible.

Our common concern is with “white allies” who show solidarity on their own terms, ignoring the counsel and opinions of those they are supposed to be showing solidarity with, and taking credit for actions they cannot own.

Jabar sees these white anarchists as settler pioneers who have spearheaded a tide of gentrification in his city. Not only have they gentrified Oakland, but they have also taken over the movement and diluted its potency. Their expressed desire to be well-meaning “allies” of the anti-gentrification movement has not detracted from the fact that their very presence has been damaging to the community.

Just like the liberal Turkish intelligentsia, who have the temerity to “demand” that Kurds lay down their weapons when they are being systematically persecuted by the Turkish Armed Forces.

“It is a colonial approach to activism and organising,” Jabar says.

These allegedly well-meaning allies force themselves into others’ movements without invitation and stumble around destroying everything they touch, like King Midas in reverse.

We run through the litany of failures presided over by Western political activists, journalists and NGOs.

To them, pushing for change is an institutional pre-occupation carried out on behalf of some nebulous and distant oppressed other whose welfare can be reduced to a pie chart or a catchy concept.

To us, it’s about our own flesh and blood who self-medicate to alleviate the depression of living in a nation which undervalues and persecutes them on account of their ethnicity. People who struggle to find work because of their accents, religious beliefs or the melanin content of their skin. What we need, rather than faux solidarity, is a space to come together.

The Bay Area Intifada project started after long conversations between Jabar, a long time resident of Oakland, and a Palestinian comrade. It provides an online environment where global discussion involving everyone who has an active interest in the politics and culture of decolonisation can take place. It is simultaneously an information hub, a sprawling network and a reporting project.

It might seem contradictory to hold faith that Facebook pages and Twitter accounts can achieve anything of substance, especially in this age of slacktivism. But Bay Area Intifada has emerged as a place for those who are looking to learn about the struggles of others, in order to better guide their own.

Their reporting from Turkey has been insightful indeed, especially in the aftermath of the deadly explosions at a peace rally in Ankara. After I had checked in with everyone I could think of in my hometown, I saw the Bay Area Intifada report:

It meant a great deal to have a brother on the ground who knows the fight from his own neighbourhood, who could extend solidarity to ours. It meant that our struggle lives on in Oakland, and Oakland’s struggle lives here. Rather than just passing on news, Bay Area Intifada has also done its own original reporting from Turkey:

For me, though, the most uplifting Turkey update has been pointing out how white settler colonial mentality is a common global problem all over the world:

The most moving aspect of Bay Area Intifada is its embodiment of a practice which poses a fundamental challenge to colonisation. We people of colour know very well what it means for our culture to be exterminated, our faith trampled for being “oppressive” by white liberal standards.

We are forced to feel ashamed of our names, our language, our spiritual connection to the world. But the same people who rob us of our traditions also appropriate them for profit and prestige.

Eastern religions are stripped of their significance to become add-Buddha-and-stir instant fixes for middle class Westerners looking to find their true north. Africans with cornrows or dreadlocks are branded as potential criminals in the eyes of polite society, while white people sporting the same styles are being celebrated as brave and cool.

To be truly effective, decolonisation has to take a different approach to fellow struggling cultures. Bay Area Intifada creates a hearth for people of colour to gather around and gift to one another the wisdom of their forbears. This is not the politics of half-hearted “allies” who pontificate under the cover of solidarity. This is the politics of kinsfolk.

At the end of our long conversation, as I walked my brother Jabar to a cab, he briefly summarised the spirit of Bay Area Intifada with cheerful succinctness. “Well,” he said, “it’s all about planting seeds.”

Comments

"we" are all the poorest and most oppressed of our group.
broke white people are to blame for gentrification, not economic systems that are out of any individual's control.
worst-case, most egregious examples are scattered liberally in this argument, to dam anyone who considers themselves implicated in this.
taking the word intifada seems like a colonialist tactic to me, but what do i know...
i just suck cocks.

Also, "Our common concern is with “white allies” who show solidarity on their own terms, ignoring the counsel and opinions of those they are supposed to be showing solidarity with, and taking credit for actions they cannot own."

What exactly is wrong with doing things on your own terms you IP ally seeking jackass? 'Own' terms are what matter. The point is to meet in the middle somewhere when multiple perspectives come together.

Solidarity is for suckers. And no, you pose no challenge to colonization, especially with your backdoor nationalism.

The Intifada is a self-victimizing, self-martyrizing nationalist movement rooted in Islamo-fascist/antisemitic tendencies that are nearly a century old. Throwing rocks at tanks is also the absolute Gandhi game of self-sacrifice for the Nation and within an illusive binary of fighting the "imperalist aggressor".

These Leftists will energetically force our eyes away from the historical reality of the hardcore support of the Palestinian national liberation movement for the Third Reich, and that wasn't just some conjectural compromise for empowerment against Western imperialism (that Germany was a powerful actor in, since the "Second Reich"). The Palestinian Mufti also led the Croatian "revolutionary" Ustaše to viciously partake in the Yugoslav side of the Holocaust. While Netanyahu's recent statements about him were by-design exagerrated and manipulative with clearing Hitler's name while putting all the blame for the Holocaust on the Muslims, this doesn't hide the reality of this movement's participation into it, and in support of GERMAN IMPERIALISM.

The fascists these days, with the apparent support of the deluded Western Left, have been playing this intricate game of whitewash that involves double and triple loops.

Why go back to the 1930s? The 'pro-Palestine' left TODAY is complicit with virulent antisemitism, with murderous racist gangsters like the PFLP and hizbollah lauded as "legitimate resistance", with all kinds of wack job conspiracy theories about Zionism, with the French socialist involvement in last summers pogroms, with the overall mood of radical nationalism breaking out all over the place, etc. What's going on now is concerning in its own right, no need to assume the always dubious position of defending something bibi said.

Why stress? This is the binary universal, if you fret about it, you perpetuate its significance. Let it go, and if the global community let it go, it would go away, that's what anarchism is about dude!

Yeah but antisemitism was swept under the rug among the western New Left.... you can't deny it. I never heard or read ISM-types in NA bullshit Jews upfront, and Kalle Lasn, almost but not clearly... and I've seen some of the even associating with naive liberal Left Jewish people (like those pro-Palestine Jews). The idea is that since the '90s in the West (perhaps before) you've been having this smokescreen being spread about Israel and the Muslim world, that is strangely consistent with the RAF's rhetoric about the Munich Olympics massacre....which isn't, in any way, some insignificant detail.

by your logic. I dunno. But it'd be nice to a) know what you have against Grumps, and b) explain what you actually mean.

I suspect you're the person who I previously asked for proof regarding PFLP antisemitism. You said, "Look it up on Google." I did, and it wasn't hard. But what am I supposed to look up this time? "Have postwar Nazis bought out the left?" is probably not gonna turn up a result as concrete as, say, the Wikipedia page about the rue Copernic synagogue bombing.

Leftist anti-Zionism in the West is rather uncomfortably implicated/wrapped up with anti-Jewish racism, full stop. But there's something a little... anti-Deutsch about what you're saying, and I don't think it's wrong to ask you to clarify. Furthermore, I question how much your rhetoric is helpful to ending the often-related scourges of judenhass, conspiracist thinking, and moronic anti-imperialism.

EDIT: self-deprecation is necessary here... how much does my dumb comment do anything for anything either?

Nah, I'm not grumpy, but I did bring up the pflp, in particular because 'radicals' where I live are always proclaiming solidarity for them, and they are an example of a horrible nationalist group that gets a pass for being leftist. This whole subject is a good example of horribly binary leftist thought that no one should get caught up in - the underdog-ism of naive anti-imperialism leads to such dark places very quickly. I've been wanting to write an essay about anti-Zionism, anti-semitism and the left, but I don't know if anyone would care. The basic point is that while rightist Zionists have been a long time trying to shut people up by saying that criticizing Israel is antisemitic, the left has (incorrectly) inverted this into the counter-claim that nothing that can be related to being anti-Israel is actually antisemitic, that antisemitism is not a real thing anymore, which I've definitely heard activists say. Or that Israel is part of the west, which politically it is but Jews have really never been welcomed into western society, except for a bit within the past century. The forms it takes may be less obvious to people who aren't targeted by it - for instance, where I live Christian 'judeophilia'/fetishization/cultural appropriation is popular, which is ultimately pretty antisemitic as well.

You're the one alluding to "anti-Deutsch" sentiment? How is "anti-Deutsch" to you anything else than a counter-antiracist or counter-anti-antisemite conceptual acrobacy made wide-spread by Neonazis themselves?

More specifically... where did I accuse or been bitching against GERMANS at all in that comment? You're sounding strange...

But I agree that the Left's anti-zionism has been too much and conveniently equated by the Right to antisemitism. While being anti-zionist doesn't make you anti-semite, there's also a widespread deluded narrative among the Left (the one I refered to above, which presents Israel as an all-out imperialist Jewish project, where the war of 1948 was nothing short of a "colonial military aggression" according to it) which illustrates Muslim Palestinians as some sort of repressed progressive revolutionaries and the Jewish Israelis as fascist invaders. As I also wrote, today's fascism is full of double and triples loops.

I ain't the anon who posted the stuff about the PFLP, but it didn't surprised me. Also the RAF has indeed sided all-the-way with Black September and other Palestinian antisemitic "Leftist" organizations. Was there a connection between Black September and the Black Front beyond the names and the fact that the latter was the Leftist wing of the Nazi party, who had a plan of post-war survival of the regime?

Also realize that the the line between social-democrats and national-socialists can get blurry and it did... and it wasn't just the SA, but also progressive political organizations in many parts of the the world, from Nasser's regime to the FLN to Peron's Leftist supporters.

Mohawks on black folk are cool, sort of unify the Mohican indigenous warrior anarchist with the African Masai heritage, Mr T for example, with bling chains to mock the Sparticus rebellion against slavery.

And what out for those dreadlock anarchist chicks with their black clothing that's all there to provide contrast to celebrate their whiteness!

(not that I'm defending this stigmatic sub-fashion that now has been recycled by the liberal entryists, but that just gross to associate cosmetics with any ideology or racist stance, especially in the big mess that NA is)

You really don't understand the aesthetics of fashion as an identity statement do you? Fashion is visual statement duh, its not like everything is linguistic, there's sign language and body language and fashion, its not as if fashion is solely some commercial capitalist investment, though most of it has been misappropriated by merchants, the idea of social intelligence is most efficiently advertised by our attire and body language, thus liberating the illiterate from the imposed stigma of social worthlessness. Many indigenous tribes which are non-materialistic and devoid of private property have only this one avenue to express themselves, as individuals, to flaunt their beauty and imagination, though they are poverty stricken and wonder where the next meal is coming from.

Spontaneity ! For a start I abhor the Freudian leftist definition of "ego", and how it has confused novice individualists from their desired Stirnerist pursuit because it translated via a leftist bent. It is being yourself midst domination by automatons or robots, or their equivalent indoctrinated organic devotees , the loss of joy, creative utility, happy who gives a fuck day, abolish work and become self-sufficient ( Like you Bob Black you no snitch brother! ) Patronizing holocaust for the Yiddish sense of humor?!
I can only say that people are fools, and only true artistes should ever be allowed to be benevolent dictators in the times when revolution is tearing away at the fabric, and one collective sentement must choose one person, that it is an artiste for the interim period, that is all I can say besides being labelled as a racist, sexist moron, I don't really care,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Fashion and Body-language are not only
Right-on, but actually reveal the crux of
How we can appreciate expression of
Our intuitive and sentient based ability
To relate and create a sensual sensibility
To our movements. The rest( "content") ,
treatises, " hard core" Stratagems, are a lot of hot air, filled with dis-credited concepts ,
The remnants of a poverty of theory,
Mired in Hegelian dialectics. Getting us
nowhere, fast.

Yeah just look at the speed at which people walk. The indigenous walk casually and aware of the habitat whereas the Westerner rapidly strides to work or drives through peak hour to pursue the material encapsulated identity/reality, the concrete highwayed industrialized countryside, whereas, walking slowly ensures that you will not blunder around a corner and step on a rattlesnake, watching for signs and tracks of other entities existing within ones same space. The models on the catwalk reveal the absurdity of the cultural values and a lack of broad aesthetic forms, the gait resembles the reptile stalking the butterfly as it tears its way out of its material cocoon.

Identity politics is back, it never went away - why? It sells. It's a proven tool for recruiting and mobilizing, and for a populist that's all that matters. This framework is at home with the "pro-Palestinian" left as with the person below who seems to be an apologist for white supremacy. See Perlman on the "continuing appeal of nationalism". I think a huge question for radicals involves how to not let social movement be taken over and halted in their growth by this type of perspective and all the emotional manipulation that goes with it.

Should be a four letter word to anarchists. Also, why should anarchists be interested in any kind of growth(as opposed to transformation). Growth is the reason why ALL movements reek of shit. One of the most successful movements in history was of course Fascism. That was no accident.

Poor white people are killing themselves at epidemic levels and I have no doubt Bay Area Intifada would blame the victim. What ever happened to class analysis? Maybe the reason poor white people are reactionary is because they have no shared interest in identity politics? Its just a bunch of middle class hoo hah dressed up as relevant, meanwhile the majority of the underclass is pushed away. The Republicans will take them up, but given the cut throat nature of the party and its various ideologies, underclass failures to achieve some version of success founded on conservative virtues drives them towards drugs and suicide.

White underclass. Not good enough for identity politicians. Not good enough for the middle class. Not good enough for the rich. Our epidemics are the butt of everyone else's jokes, yet if we complain, we are the ones with the problem. Nobody is listening to us and our constant pointing out of moral hypocrisy on these issues, with IPs always calling on white supremacy to justify their untenable position.

Just face it, the logic is not there for IPs to of gained so much traction in the left. The only reason this happened is because the left is so cowardly they defer to anyone that shows any sign of conviction.

‘Independent being’ is an intellectual idealization that is not found in the physical reality of our natural experience. As both Stirner and Nietzsche have pointed out, we take a word and associate it with a form or figure that lives by its relations with other forms or figures, and we use language to impute ‘subjecthood’ to it, and then we let subject inflect verb and impute spook-power to it so that, as far as our reasoned discourse goes, it becomes the independent subject with God-like internal powers that purportedly author its development and behaviour.

Voila! here we have ‘the sound of one hand clapping’, ... the Stirnerian spook, the Nietzschean subject-verb-predicate ‘great stupidity’, ... the hitting that is defined without fielding, the intention-driven actualization that has been liberated from ‘situation’. This is the spook of Christian doctrine (independent human being with free-will who chooses between good and evil behaviours), and it is the spook of mainstream science ('organism' as independent material body with internal process driven and directed behaviour); i.e. the analytical view separates a notional ‘system’ out of the relational suprasystem it is inextricably, relationally, included in).

But it is soooo common in Western thinking to collect spooks in sets or categories according to the Platonic concept of ideal forms. One first supposes that a category exists [invents BEING] then gathers together a collection of would-be members and extracts their local, measurable commonalities which then defines membership in the set, out of the context of the relational suprasystem in which they are each uniquely situationally included. This is circular reasoning which Poincaré referred to as “a disease that mathematics will have to recover from”;

"Poincaré enunciates the vicious circle principle: a thing cannot be defined with respect to a collection that presupposes the thing itself ... because doing so produces an impredicative definition." -- Jules Henri Poincaré, 'Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'

Instead of understanding a storm or human as a relational system that arises and is sustained in equilibrium with the relational suprasystem it is uniquely, situationally included in, an equilibrium it derives its power and steerage from [sailboat style], we can use ‘sets’ to ‘set it up’ as a ‘spook’, a local independent being with internal spook-power that supposedly drives and directs its development and behaviour [this 'gets the relational suprasystem 'out of the picture''].

Instead of white, black, red, yellow men being ‘different’ due to their unique situational inclusion within the transforming relational contain-unum (relational suprasystem), as acknowledges their ‘INTERdependence’ of form and attribute;

“the dynamics of the (diverse) inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach’s principle

IPs go with Plato’s ideal forms, the circular logic of sets, and humans as spooks.

The author says;

“the same people who rob us of our traditions also appropriate them for profit and prestige.”

What if a person is half white and half black? As Groucho Marx said when he was refused membership in an East Coast beach club because he was jewish; “my son is only half jewish, could he go in the water up to his knees?”

Of course white males of European descent are the extremists of Identity Politics and have carried it into the foundational laws of the United States to justify the appropriation of, and imposing Supreme Authoritarian domination over, a goodly portion of turtle island.

“JOHNSON v. MCINTOSH, 21 US 543 (FEBRUARY, 1823) -- "On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy. The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity."

These white European-descent ‘spooks’ see themselves as the best on the planet. That is how the U.S. Supreme Court justifies the seizure and imposing of sovereigntist domination of the lands now known as ‘the United States of America’.

But why would blacks and females want to become IPs and grow their own spook cults and adopt this same ‘great stupidity’?

As Nietzsche says, it is ‘slave morality’, ressentiment, as is implicit in the author’s comments;

there is a two-edged sword here, once we start 'believing' that categories 'really exist'; i.e. when we make ourselves members of spook-cults and play the game of Identity Politics, as with sovereign state nationalism, we bring on the whole binary win/loss, superior/inferior, offender/victim, good/evil, truth/falsehood catastrophe.

we are all participants in a dynamic relational unum. the classification into separate sets is a convenience that facilitates discourse but the separateness is intellectual fabrication. can we separate the variety of storm-cells into different categories? sure we can; ‘tropical depression’, ‘tropical storm’, hurricane category 1, category 2, category 3, category 4, category 5. how do we ‘identify’ which category a storm falls into? by the attributes we specified that constitute the rules of membership that give rise to the notional category.

are these categories ‘real’? how about the amplification categories on a guitar amplifier, the 10 categories of amplification. why don’t we add a category 11, so that we can ‘go one better’ than the amplifiers that only go up to 10? [‘Spinal Tap’ famous quote; ‘these ones go to 11’]

"These ones are a different category of thing" because of the measurements we impose on them that define the categories.

If you are biracial fraternal twins who have been getting along fine; "But Maria loves telling people at college that she has a white twin – and I’m very proud of having a black twin.", ... be careful who you talk to in the Bay area.

But who is your mid-game reliever? You know how important it is during you know the 6th, 7th and 8th innings to be able to bring in a reliever and save your closer for the 9th, right? You know that, right? Or are you trapped in that old hitting/fielding binary?

hitting-fielding is not a 'binary' it is a 'coincidentia oppositorum' and that's why this baseball analogy was used by Stephen Jay Gould, as the leitmotif in his book 'Full House' to critique Darwinian 'natural selection' aka 'survival of the fittest'.

his point was that how well an organism fares is not fully and solely attributable to his asserting 'hitting' competencies, but more importantly, in how the fielding (the dynamics of habitat) accommodate, in reciprocal complementarity, hitting (the dynamics of the inhabitant).

i don't expect you to 'hear' this, but i offer it in case there may be third party interest.

the point is that all dynamics have this two-sided unity where 'possibility-opening situation' is reciprocally complementary with 'asserting action'. this physical reality is termed 'relativity' [a 'coincidence of opposites'], which, as einstein, poincare and others have pointed out, requires the investigator to take into account the 'relativity of space' to more comprehensively understand dynamics as we naturally experience them.

the popular 'economy-of-thought default' is to reduce our linguistic expression of dynamics to one-sided, all hitting, no-fielding RE-presentation by assuming an absolute space and absolute time measurement/reference frame. this simplistic but culturally popular default, allows us to consider the inhabitants as 'independent beings' that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally 'independent' of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.

example; the inhabitants of turtle island were more 'creative' and 'performant' prior to the oppressive influences put in place by the colonizers. if, and as, we see indigenous peoples resuming hunting and fishing etc. that we haven't seen them doing for a long time, ... such 'new' development and behaviour is not fully and solely attributable to the assertive agents, but arises from a 'backing off' of oppressive influences that were put in place (increasing accommodation/receptivity in the 'fielding').

when ice-age glaciers melt there is 'uplift' in the land as reciprocally complementary tensional influences move into a new equilibrium. when dietary supplies of vitamins are withdrawn, there is a proliferation of microbes that we conveniently labelled 'pathogens' and hold responsible for illness [e.g. scurvy, beri-beri, rickets, pneumonia], however, the deeper source of the illness is the imbalance deriving from the withdrawal of important nutrients, that manifests, symptomatically, as a proliferation of microbes-termed-pathogens which are innocuous where there is no vitamin deficiency.

scientific minds are conditioned to looking for 'positive causality' [all hitting, no-fielding] which is why it took a long time for researchers to figure out beri-beri and scurvy which demands the more general understanding of dynamics as 'hitting-fielding' ["le microbe n'est rien, le terrain est tout" = "the fielding plays the over-riding role in establishing the hitter's performance"... the fielding can make the result a 'shut-out' or back off so as to make the hitters look as if they are masters of the action.]

Coach isn't only component of game. Why isolate game down to one person/role? And why isolate that particular role? Game unfolds from many participants in concert at once. Coach is a part of the participants of game.

You fetishize roles a lot in a very reductive manner. Gives away your politics probably more than you realize. Seems you have a problem fitting square pegs into round holes.

Its culture as the omnipresence, the "game" or "spectacle" are incidental, emile is only attempting to define the players role in the unfolding political environment subsumed by the omnipresence, that's all, no big actual ideological faction, just clearing up the muddle of leftist infiltration into anarchist space mkay?

pitching comes BEFORE both hitting and fielding. in the beginning, God -- a southpaw, as it turns out -- threw out the ceremonial FIRST PITCH and it was neither a ball nor a strike for there was no a batter at the plate just yet -- that came after Satan declared "Play ball!" And yes yes yes when there came a batter up to the plate, it was none but woe unto him that can't hit the 98 MPH fastball, for he shall get no hits.

And what comes after the social role of trolling? What happens when it's passe? It's not really an impressive ability to derrail a conversation.

Will it be the internet is no longer of any use? Since humans value the internet more and more the variety of relations and interactions in meatspace are shrunken. Irl is lonely, impoverished, and insufferably banal.

Hmm, maybe trolls are the lonely ones, alienated and denigrated, their only outlet in physical space is negated, they return to the monitor and cyber freedom, to vent their frustrations. But is this not the post-survival evolutionary prerogative that entities on the up kick into out of the realization that they have made it, have survived, feeling good, Barry White mode of reproduction, no?

And wait... have you just attempted to make sense in that hermetic, concatented last sentence or you're just an AI going through the usual syntaxic glitches? Or I didn't hear about any "post-survival evolutionary prerogative" in the news. Does it have to do with... stuff?